Birthday On The Keys Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Sleep entails smoking hideous white,
Getting married in a horn of a snail, reclining
To the green zinc coffins stamped up the hill,
The mad processions recalling your little sisters
Moribund- Almost beautiful forever asleep:

My sad confessions to the since dead priest:
I’ve been trying to emulate Rimbaud, the evil young
Boy; and I’ve been lying-
I’ve been looking at the back of her neck, and smoking
Inadequate things beside the musseled viaduct of
My crimes:

And if she is a lawyer, she is still beautiful:
As petit and beautiful as her onyx-banged crimes of
High school: And she has since gone and married
A fair haired lover,
And they keep a dog without any cages,
And let him dig frivolously down beside the sea:

Where, I suppose she’s never seen my mermaid weeping,
Even though I hear rumors she still weeps twice weekly for
The boy I was,
For my promised suicides, my dry-wall abusements;
And the sweet innocents, as the jaybirds sing I still
Can’t drive a clutch:

I still don’t have a yard: Though, my mother’s cut my
Hair: Its turned gray. Crow’s feet and apoplexy shirk my looks,
But it won’t stop me from going back to school:
I’ll skip out to sing with weep-some lions;
I’ll feed them my same head; and the alligators, I’ll
Cry for them
Just the same as the punch lines for sincere young crocodiles

All in a swampy chorus line underneath the blush armpits
Of Bromeliad Tillandsia, where I once stole a nudy magazine,
And went back to the excruciating hotel room and stared longingly into
Your eyes who were still so young and human and having a birthday
On the keys.